qt_tools is a free command line for the Quicktime infrastructure in Mac OS. As it is only a wrapper all audio and video formats supported by Quicktime can be used. This also allows the usage of products like Flip4Mac in automated workflows.
The problem is, that it is not that easy to find the needed parameters in the man page. Furthermore encoder specific settings can not always be configured using parameters. To work around this problem configuration files can be used. The following example illustrates how a specific Flip4Mac configuration can be created.
As already explained we first have to create a configuration file for the desired operation. To do that the –dodialog parameter is used to show the exporter specific configuration interface. As soon as the dialog is closed the configuration is saved to /tmp/wmv.conf.
qt_export --exporter=ASF_,TELE --savesettings=/tmp/wmv.conf --dodialog
After that it can be used to encode a file. It it important to note that Quicktime requires an existing display (as noted in the man page) and therefore can not be used in remote contexts like a webserver.
qt_export --loadsettings=/tmp/wmv.conf /path/to/your/input/video.m4v /path/to/your/export/video.wmv